WoW – More fun together!

And This is Why I Don’t Run 25 Mans

Last night we get on, hoping to have Tol Barad so we can do BH. Alliance doesn’t do well at holding TB but we do seem to take it Tuesdays just long enough to get runs in. Well, we didn’t have it, so we went off to run heroics.

Got two runs in with two sets of alts (and my brother) when TB changed hands. We found out because a guildie started trying to put together a 25 man. Well, I hate 25 mans, so we stayed quiet, planning to build a ten man out of alts once they’d done 25.

Only it took them a while to get things together and they started asking us to go – and then, Reversion was changing characters from an alt to his main, and on logging in, had a group invite that he thought was from us but was actually to the 25 man. And once he was inside, we felt stuck. we didn’t want to be rude to guildies, and come on, it’s just BH, how bad can it be?

So my brother got in (last week, he tried to go during the afternoon because he usually has class at night. This same person told him he couldn’t tank it because he didn’t have 150k health unbuffed. We told him later that was garbage) and I reluctantly switched off of Invariant, where I’d been working on excavating my epic purple archeology ring, and onto Analogue. The raid was about half full and more trickled in.

Our friend Repgrind was wisely staying out. Until I mentioned that there were no holy paladins yet, and how bad could it really be, right? And she reluctantly joined. A few more people, three or four pugs, and we were almost ready. I asked Falahla if she wanted to go, thinking hey, quick free epics and points. Right?

So there we are getting ready. I’d forgotten how much of my UI a 25 man Vuhdo setup takes. Five healers; I started whispering Kerick and Elia to try to set up a dispell priority between us, since I expected us to be dispelling and not so sure what the other two healers would do. Elia pointed out we had a priest and surely, he would mass dispel and save us a lot of mana. Right? And Kerick’s UI, being not set up for 25s because she doesn’t do them, as I well knew, doesn’t lend itself well to things like “You cover Group 3”. Oh well.

First attempt, I notice things aren’t getting cleansed, start cleansing. People die. Fell firestorm hits. The flames hit really freaking hard. We wipe. Ugh. I die some time before the wipe which means Elia wins the dispel meter with 9 to my 5. The priest is saying he managed to get off mass dispel 2 or 3 times and then he got distracted with heals. I check. He cleansed two people. So either he dispelled once, or we were dispelling people before he could, or he had terrible aim. Sigh. We go back, try again. Wipe. Go back again.

This time on the meter I see 25 dispels each for me, Elia, and Kerick, with the next healer at 16 and the priest at… 5. Ouch.

Finally I speak up and say “Look, we need to all cover a group”. I hand out assignments, specify who is in those groups for those who don’t have their UI set up like that, and finally just say “if you can’t tell who is in your group just cleanse someone”.

It seemed to help. Even if just three of us could see “assigned” groups easily, it seemed to focus us enough that cleanses were going off, not missing them, or wasting mana cleansing people someone else had just sniped. A couple people die but we’re doing ok mostly – and then suddenly people start dropping. Oh. We hit enrage with 5% to go. Ouch.

Now, Baradin Hold drops pvp gear and so we had a couple people who are more focused on pvp than pve. Mostly they were doing fine, but there was one mage… he’s a guildie, a nice guy but totally into PVP. We took him on a heroic last week and he kept dying to puddles of poison, water spouts, etc, because he just isn’t expecting environmental damage to be an issue. His dps was under 5k. PVP gear for the win, I suppose. But he was the one doing the most “oh we should have had that” moaning! And he…. well, we said as we were running back that “if we’d had a few more people we would have done that” meaning a few more people alive longer. He was confused and thought we needed more people in the raid. It’s funny how you can play the same game with someone, someone who is good even, but be talking different languages.

Finally we get back, do things the same way again, and this time the guy dies. In all it’s been close to an hour and a half, between trying to find people, trying to get them there, trying to get them all at their keyboards and not sniping at each other, trying to get them to do the right thing, trying to recover from wipes…. ugh. NOT worth the extra points, or loot. The loot was all pvp garbage anyway. I won a cape and gave it to Elia because she pvps a lot more than I do (and again. Things that piss me off. Warlocks rolling on capes with spirit. Come on).

Half the raid is people I don’t mind running heroics with sometimes but won’t raid with. In only a few weeks I’ve gotten used to having raid vent be friendly and cheerful and professional. Last night it was noisy, people talking over each other, people being obnoxious, and people inspecting gear and calling each other out over Vent, which is…. inexcusable to my mind. If we’re trying to get ready to go and you see a minor issue with someone, whisper them. It’s wasting 23 other peoples’ time to do it over vent, it’s disrespectful and annoying to the person being examined. And this happened not once but twice with two different sets of people, although one case was way more egregious.

We could have run that place 10 man twice as fast. Easily. Probably more than that because we don’t wipe in 10 mans. I’m not making that same mistake again. I’ll be rude; the annoyance is not worth it to me.

I’m really glad Blizzard made 10 and 25 mans exclusive in Cataclysm. I don’t want to be forced to do 25s for gear or to farm points. I love my ten man raid, I have fun with a couple close friends. In 25 mans you’re a cog in the wheel, and the other 24 cogs may or may not be people you like, at all.

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BTW, I know this certain DK tank that hit 85 last night. He needs CoC for a weapon, and only has 115k health, but he has an AIL of 331 from rep gear/JC trinket/BoE bracers. If certain people wanted to carry him through, say, SFK or a couple randoms this week in a DPS role so he could nab some tank gear, he would probably appreciate it.😉

Oh yeah, and I just arranged to have Monday off, since it’s technically a paid holiday for me. Yay 3 day weekend!

Hm, this probably should have been an email instead of a comment. haha

It’s very rare that I ever say “I’m glad I wasn’t there”… But I’m glad I wasn’t there. Sounds horrible.
I’d be more than happy to help kaly get gear. Just let me know when and where.
I’ll offer (can’t believe I’m doing this) to try being the extra tank if one is needed. I always carry the gear anyways.

Might take you up on that. I need to look at the drake combo again and think about it a bit. I think it was a nasty one. Not this weekend but next weekend.
Now where did I leave that post about tank training.😀 heheheh

Yeah, that’s definitely an option, although I’d also like to take the chance to get someone in, we’ve got a couple people who’ve been interested, and that would let us use the time-tested “bubble” strat…

Storm Rider, Time Warden, Whelps is the combo this week, according to wowpedia.org It seems to be a pretty unforgiving one. The Storm rider needs to be out for interupts and both the whelps and the timewarden are heavy AOE damage before release.

For a two tank strat I’m thinking whelps and storm rider out from the start with the whelps split between tanks. Should be doable without the MS debuff. Kill storm and then whelps while time warden is released.

Three tanking is prolly easier to set up but might have isssues with enrage as the interupter and tank are not doing more damage until a drake dies now. If three tanking then the whelps should die first as each death nerfs the damage done by the proto behemoth.

Might also be possible to brute force it with a drake and halfus on one tank and whelps and one drake on another.

The brute force method is bad with the storm rider up. One badly timed interupt getting through and a tank is toast. We usally let a couple through. Splitting the drakes out sounds good. Tough tanking though. Don’t think I would want to do that with anyone but a very experianced tank.

With as good as we have gotten at healing the raid damage, and interupting I am not too worred about this combo. Not an easy one though. Two tanks should be enough. If the inturputs hit well durring the first couple minutes then the healing will actually be a much easier than last week was. The problem is likely to be the enrage timer.

Oops! Forgot about the bop thingy. Cool, I can do that. Just remember, for now, I’m carrying all that tank stuff around, so if you ever want to have me switch for any given pull to try it out… I will log out grom in his tank set tonight after I look at reforging. Check it out and let’s see what needs tuning.

To interject on your Halfus Strat – they changed the cast timer of the shadow nova now – so any tank can handle the interrupts alone (providing they’re hit capped). It doesn’t hurt to have say, a mage or shaman as a backup – but it’s not necessary.

We generally leave the drakes down and do whelps first (cumulatively they hit harder than a drake becuase more little hits get in), tank swap for the MS with the 2nd drake being released, and repeat. 2 tanks and 2 healers – though it’s pretty mana intensive at the start (2T 3H might work better). Liberal use of CDs should see you through it.

Good luck! Oh, and I agree on the 25s thing. Bugger that. The only way I see myself going back to 25s is if my current guild disentigrates, and I’m forced to start looking for a new home.

You have to bring the Storm Rider or the cast will not be interuptable. I had forgotten about the cast timing change. That should be nice.
We have not two healed any of the combos yet. Might have to try that in the future.

Heh. I confess to being a HUGE fan of your blog, adgamorix. If your guild disintigrated, I can guarantee you would be bombarded with flowers, candy, bribes, flattery … and anything else our group could come up with to get you to play with us.😛

Oh my gosh- this post pretty much matches my thoughts EXACTLY! If I wasn’t at work, there might even be a few shouted “Amens”! I wouldn’t have gone at all except that Analogue specifically asked me, and then I felt like I should go help out my fellow raiders. Darn my guilt! So yeah, in future weeks, if you want to form a 10 man for BH, I’m game. If its a 25 man, lets just pretend that Sassypants is not me.

One of the worst parts of this is how you feel about having dragged a person along who didn’t really want to go. Frequently, when I have to ask this or that friend to come into Heroic/Raid/BG X, I end up feeling like a jerk for wasting their time when it goes poorly. It’s enough to be upset at people’s behavior and performance without having to feel guilty about subjecting another to it.

Exactly – but I was so happy to have Falahla and Repgrind there last night whispering to me. I need to get our Girls Only Gossip Channel going, I swear, I had at least three whisper conversations going at any one time. At least we could laugh at the situation. Even if I do feel bad about it….

Yes, while I feeling crushing guilt at bringing a friend along to a failing amateur hour raid, I do like having someone to make biting, sarcastic comments to. If only he’d come and do that willingly! (:

It really does help relieve the tension, doesn’t it? Here’s a tip: in my horde guild, the two of us with the most raid experience use binds in vent… If we set up a different ptt key, we can talk all night, and nobody else in channel can hear us🙂

The one danger of this is, of course, the dreaded Mistell. My friend had it happen once when a greedy guildmate (who’d geared out one spec and then switched) gobbled up an item that my friend had been working months for. In raid, we all saw rf***ing moondell… (minus the *, of course, but I don’t want to offend anyone). Nothing more was said of it.